........................................................................................ - a weBlog by Snowy and me.

Thursday, 8 January 2015

Un-Neighbourliness Refined

Charity as legalised theft, which shrinks the life of the poor
is well known. Modern tax laws in rich countries now reward it.
From Pre-Victorian times onward the rich and powerful
in England divided the poor between the worthy and the unworthy.
The worthy and blindly obedient worked hard to keep themselvesin poverty but out of penury, the better to stay away
from the then modernised workhouse where the unworthy
displaced from labour on the land and the factories
were pushed into squalor as a disincentive
to free people like them, people free to be unworthy.

The inheritors of that cruel logic of help-designed
-to-help-the-helper-more than-the-helped now live
in the third world. Where like work house managers,
local cleptocracies shrink the self government of others
to something less than useless. In third world countries
this raises the value of bribes and forces the populous
to fend for themselves in confining circumstances.

At a crisis point western charities try to help the poorest
and most displaced in refugee camps, by providing
the simplest of means to keep them from dying.
But as always the devil lurks in the detail.

Much more money is raised at home than is spent abroad,
and the media profile of the charity comes to matter
more to it's donors than any actual effect it has of being a help.
More than that, nobody dares do enough toward
improving the governance in poorly ruled countries
because that would be seen as 'being invasive',
particularly when bad government gives people
who might otherwise do nothing
so many vital good works to perform.